BP chief executive Bob Dudley is defying international opinion by visiting Russia this weekend, where he is set to meet with Igor Sechin, head of energy giant Rosneft.

Dudley, a US citizen, was attending the St Petersburg Forum where Sechin, a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, delivered a keynote speech yesterday.

Sechin is subject to international sanctions and has been on the US Treasury’s blacklist since last month following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He is a former KGB officer and is thought to be the mastermind behind the Kremlin’s energy strategy.

BP has a 19.75 per cent stake in Rosneft. Dudley is on the board of Rosneft – the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company.

A BP spokesman said it ‘had a responsibility’ to shareholders and wanted to ‘leave the politics to others’.

Separately, BP is to challenge a US appeal court decision that the company must continue to pay compensation to claimants over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 without the need for them to demonstrate a connection to the disaster.